SEO Keyword Research (Part 3: Keyword Competitiveness)
Finding the Gems
Great, now you have identified the relevant, high volume keywords that you want to go after. What’s next?
Many high volume keywords are highly competitive, and you’d have a very hard time getting on to the front page of Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft Live for those keywords.
To find the gems, we need to find keywords that are relevant, have reasonable volume, AND are not very competitive.
So the next question we have to answer is: How competitive are these keywords?
Some of the tools we have mentioned previously provide some metrics for measuring keyword competitiveness. For example, WordTracker provides a KEI (keyword effectiveness index) to give us a sense of how competitive a keyword is.
But let’s dig a little deeper into the world of keyword competitiveness…
Keyword Competitiveness Metrics
There are many ways to determine how competitive a keyword is.
The most common queries that SEO consultants like to run to determine keyword competitiveness are:
- Number of Pages for the Keyword
- Number of Pages with the Keyword in the title
- Number of Pages with the Keyword in the anchor text
This metric tells you how many pages are competing to be in the top search results for a given keyword.
To find this out, simply go to the search engine of your choice and type in the keyword and look at the number of pages for your keyword.
The number of pages with this keyword in the title tells you how many pages are being “SEO” optimized for a particular keyword. Whenever a page is being optimized for search engines, one of the basic things that the publisher or SEO consultant will do is add the keyword to the title tag of the page. Therefore, this is a good metric for getting a sense of how many people are competing for this keyword.
To find this out, simply go to the Google and type in allintitle: followed by the keyword and look at the number of pages for your keyword.
This metric tells you how backlinks there are with the particular keyword in the anchor text. More sophisticated SEO efforts focus on building links with the keyword in the anchor text of the link. Also, since your Google Rankings will be heavily impacted by this (the number of links with your target keyword as the anchor text), this is also a good metric for how hard it will be to rank on this keyword in Google.
To find this out, simply go to the Google and type in inanchor: followed by the keyword and look at the number of pages for your keyword.
These three queries are a great way for you to quickly, and easily find out how competitive your target keyword is!
